Unpopular Front

American art and the Cold War.

Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe, it was a war for hearts and minds—an idea war, an image war, a propaganda war. Global combat on these terms was the policy of the American government. There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.

It seems a contradiction, even hypocritical, for the United States to have promoted the Western values of free elections, free speech, and free markets by covert methods. Democracy means accountability; that’s what makes democratic governments different from authoritarian and totalitarian ones. But, until its cloak unravelled in the late nineteen-sixties, the C.I.A., and the people who were in on its activities, operated in secrecy. They kept the secret because they understood the logic. The target audience for cultural propaganda in the Cold War was foreign élites—in particular, left-wing intellectuals and avant-garde writers and artists who might still have some attachment, sincere, sentimental, or opportunistic, to Communism and the Soviet Union. The essence of the courtship was: it’s possible to be left-wing, avant-garde, and anti-Communist. Look at these American artists and intellectuals, happily criticizing bourgeois capitalism and shocking mainstream tastes, all safely protected by the laws of a free society. In Russia, these people would be in the Lubyanka, or somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.

In practice, though, the American creed boils down to this: you have a right to say or create what you please, but the taxpayer doesn’t have to pay for it. Highbrow criticizing and shocking are regarded by most Americans as toxic by-products of the culture of liberty: they show that we’re serious about the First Amendment, but there is no reason to subsidize them. This was one of the lessons of the congressional attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts at the very end of the Cold War; but the lesson had been learned before, in a parallel episode, at the very start of the Cold War, an episode that defined the limits of what government could openly do in the practice of cultural diplomacy.

Taylor Littleton and Maltby Sykes’s “Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century,” recently published in a second edition (Alabama; $19.95), is an appropriately amused and acerbic account of the fiasco. In 1946, the State Department’s newly formed Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs put together a show called “Advancing American Art.” The division spent forty-nine thousand dollars of government money to purchase seventy-nine paintings by American artists. The exhibition was intended, as Littleton and Sykes put it, to be “one element in an international definition of American reassurance, stability, and enlightenment”—a friendly beacon in the grim aftermath of the war. It included works by Romare Bearden, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Ben Shahn, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence. Very few of the paintings were abstract, but most were identifiably modern: naturalist, expressionist, painterly. The State Department wanted the world to know that the United States was not just a nation of cars, chewing gum, and Hollywood movies. A preview of the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum was well received. In The Nation, Clement Greenberg, already a leading arbiter of advanced painting, wrote that the show was “a remarkable accomplishment, and its moral should be taken to heart by those who control the public destiny of art in our country.” The collection was split into two; thirty paintings were sent to Latin America, and the rest went to Paris and then to Prague. The exhibition was scheduled to continue to Hungary and Poland, but Czechoslovakia turned out to be the last stop.

In spite of the reviews, the show had been attacked by the American Artists Professional League, an organization of conservative artists and illustrators, which wrote to the State Department to complain that the selection was unrepresentative, and that the paintings that had been chosen were “strongly marked with the radicalism of the new trends in European art” and were “not indigenous to our soil.” By the time the show was overseas, the story had been picked up in the mainstream press. Look ran an article, with illustrations, under the headline “Your Money Bought These Paintings.” The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee wrote an angry letter to the Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. “The paintings are a travesty upon art,” he complained. “They were evidently gotten up by people whose object was apparently to, (1) To make the United States appear ridiculous in the eyes of foreign countries, and to (2) Establish ill-will towards the United States.”

Another congressman demanded inquiries into the political backgrounds of the artists represented in the show. It turned out that the names of eighteen of the forty-seven artists appeared in the records of the House Un-American Activities Committee; three were reported to have been members of the Communist Party. As was his habit, President Truman spoke bluntly: he described the collection as “the vaporings of half-baked lazy people.” Marshall ordered the show recalled, and the paintings were consigned to the War Assets Administration as war surplus and sold off. They brought in $5,544. An O’Keeffe sold for fifty dollars. Marshall announced that no taxpayer money would be spent on modern art again, and the State Department issued a directive that no artist suspected of being a Communist or fellow-traveller could be exhibited at government expense.

“Advancing American Art” was a boomerang, reconfirming the very prejudices about American philistinism that it was intended to demolish. It also helped to put a man named George Dondero into the history books. Dondero was a congressman from Michigan, and his tender appreciations of modern art are so often quoted that one almost suspects that he composed them with solely that aim in mind. It is hard to believe, for example, that his great 1949 speeches against “the black knights of the isms” were the work of a man incapable of irony:

The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.

Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.

Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth. . . .

Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.

Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. . . .

Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.

Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.

The State Department plainly needed to find other ways to skin this diplomatic cat. Michael Krenn’s “Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit” (North Carolina; $39.95) is a history of government efforts to send American art abroad after 1946 without throwing raw meat to the demagogues. The problem with “Advancing American Art” was that it was entirely a government program: the State Department actually owned the work that it was exhibiting. The solution was to enlist the participation of institutions like museums, foundations, and arts groups, and to give the government’s role a much lower profile. By these means, Krenn says, between 1945 and 1970 the State Department, the United States Infor-mation Agency, and the Smithsonian Institution managed to send hundreds of exhibitions of American art abroad, often to positive reviews and enthusiastic audiences.

As Krenn shows, it was not a straight road. It swerved as Cold War anxieties swerved, and the fortunes of the exhibitions had little to do with their content. You would not imagine that a show named “Sport in Art,” sponsored in part by Sports Illustrated, would arouse the anti-Communists, but it did. When the exhibition previewed, in Dallas, in 1956, it was attacked by an outfit called the Dallas County Patriotic Council, whose chairman expressed distress that “our tax money is going into the pockets of artists devoted to the destruction of our way of life.” He meant that the artists were Communists, and though the show went on in Dallas, an international tour was cancelled by the U.S.I.A., nominally because of “budgetary considerations.” A major exhibition, “American Painting, 1900-1950,” was cancelled soon afterward for the same reason: charges that some of the artists were Communists or fellow-travellers.

The official line, of course, was that art in the United States was beyond politics. Eisenhower had more patience than Truman did with modernism; he thought of cultural diplomacy as a branch of psychological warfare, and his Administration was the first to provide systematic funding for international arts exhibitions. “As long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art,” Eisenhower said in 1954, for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art. “How different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become the chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.” His Administration helped sponsor tours of American art, opera (“Porgy and Bess,” meant to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism), musical theatre, dance, and jazz.

Still, the promotion abroad of American art and letters after 1946 required a delicate form of intrigue between private institutions and government agencies. The more radical or modernist the art and letters, the more covert the government’s participation needed to be. The State Department and the U.S.I.A. could send “Oklahoma!” around the world (and did), but they could not very comfortably arrange emergency funding to keep Partisan Review afloat, as the C.I.A. seems to have done in 1953, or promote a style of avant-garde painting offensive to congressional tastes. The revelation about Encounter was part of a general exposure of the considerable extent to which the C.I.A., by means of dummy foundations and front organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, headquartered in Berlin, had subsidized and promoted activities that it calculated to be anti-Soviet. The fall-out was unpleasant. Many of the writers and editors associated with Encounter claimed that they had had no idea about the man behind the curtain; these people looked like dupes. Others claimed that “everyone knew”; these looked like the people Julien Benda warned about in “The Treason of the Intellectuals.” A shadow of suspicion fell over everything that might have elicited the interest and assistance of the C.I.A., and one of those things was Abstract Expressionism.

What would have been the geopolitical uses of abstraction? The theory, as it was proposed in articles published in Artforum and other journals in the nineteen-seventies, and then elaborated in Serge Guilbaut’s “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art” (1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders’s “The Cultural Cold War” (1999), is that abstract painting was an ideal propaganda tool. It was avant-garde, the product of an advanced civilization. In contrast to Soviet painting, it was neither representational nor didactic. It could be understood as pure painting—art absorbed by its own possibilities, experiments in color and form. Or it could be understood as pure expression—a “school” in which every artist had a unique signature. A Pollock looked nothing like a Rothko, which looked nothing like a Gorky or a Kline. Either way, Abstract Expressionism stood for autonomy: the autonomy of art, freed from its obligation to represent the world, or the freedom of the individual—just the principles that the United States was defending in the worldwide struggle. Art critics therefore developed apolitical modes of appreciation and evaluation, emphasizing the formal rigor or the existentialist drama of the paintings; and the Museum of Modern Art favored Abstract Expressionists in its purchases and international exhibitions, at the expense of art whose politics might have been problematic—the kind of naturalist art, for example, that was featured in the “Advancing American Art” exhibition. But the C.I.A. lurked in the shadows. It turned out that a Pollock had a politics.

This was a revisionist interpretation of art history, and it had two prongs. The first was the suggestion of actual collusion between MOMA and the C.I.A. The evidence for this has always been largely circumstantial. The man who directed cultural activities at the C.I.A. in the early years of the Cold War, Thomas Braden, had previously been the executive secretary of MOMA. According to Saunders, a number of MOMA trustees were also on the board of the Farfield Foundation, a C.I.A. front. The president of the museum in the nineteen-forties and fifties was Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had supported MOMA from the beginning, and who had close ties to the intelligence community and an unabashed commitment to the patriotic uses of art. (It was Nelson who had demanded the removal of Diego Rivera’s murals from the walls of Rockefeller Center, because they depicted Lenin.) During the war, Rockefeller had been the Roosevelt Administration’s coördinator of inter-American affairs; the head of the art section in that office, René d’Harnoncourt, joined MOMA in 1944 and became its director.

What this suggests, though, is simply that the leaders of MOMA, like the leaders of most mainstream institutions in the United States after the war, were anti-Communists. As Saunders acknowledges, there were no explicit arrangements between the government and the museum, and the reason was that there didn’t need to be. Everybody was on the same page. Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the founding director of MOMA, who, after the war, served as chairman of the painting and sculpture collections, did not have to be encouraged to use American art to promote the nation’s image abroad. They never pretended that they were up to anything else. Barr was a lover of European modernism, but he was on a mission to persuade Americans that theirs was a modern culture—a mission that he pursued by mounting exhibitions on modern architecture and design, and starting the museum’s department of film, headed by the formidable Iris Barry and dedicated to the proposition that Hollywood movies were part of the modern movement in the arts.

The other prong of the revisionist thesis was the attack on the critical doctrine, dominant in the nineteen-fifties and into the nineteen-sixties, that the conditions of a painting’s production and reception are irrelevant to its significance as art. On this point, the revisionists were right. Everything was shaped by Cold War imperatives after 1945, because everything is always shaped by circumstance. The “apolitical” interpretation of abstract painting derived, quite self-consciously, from a politics. Both Greenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that Abstract Expressionism was pure painting, and Harold Rosenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that it was pure expression, were left-wing anti-Communists who had been associated with the antiStalinist Partisan Review in the nineteen-forties, and whose theories of art were formed in reaction to Soviet aesthetic dogma, according to which abstraction was individualist self-indulgence. Greenberg and Rosenberg were both outspoken champions of the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg called it “American action painting.”

Still, no work reduces to a single context. When you stand before Pollock’s “Lavender Mist,” you do not think about “artistic free enterprise” or the C.I.A. or the cultural politics of Partisan Review. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing. The painting’s importance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing, because bits and pieces of it—the existentialist encounter, the “American” indifference to painterly decorum—still cling to it. After all, other ways of understanding Abstract Expressionist paintings were once possible, for images are highly malleable (one of the reasons they make poor instruments for propaganda). It might easily have been argued that Abstract Expressionist works are hostile to the spirit of liberal democracy, that they reflect a totalitarian aesthetics—monumental, peremptory constructions that make us feel our insignificance.

Pollock’s paintings have other contexts that matter. It is not the least of the many pleasures of Jed Perl’s commodious new book, “New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century” (Knopf; $35), that it has scarcely a word to say about the Cold War. The book is about a moment when painters, sculptors, dancers, poets, and performance artists, Americans and émigrés, converged on a city, and about the difference the city made to what they were able to imagine. Its sympathies are entirely with the individual artist and the act of making. Perl calls the decade after the war a Silver Age; he is in love with the moment, and he makes it glow. He also makes it unfamiliar again. Unlike most histories of American art, “New Art City” does not put the Abstract Expressionists at the center of the stage. Perl doesn’t especially like the drip paintings. The bookends of his story are not Pollock and Pollock’s evil twin, Andy Warhol; they are Hans Hofmann and Fairfield Porter.

And there are reasons to feel that the claims about MOMA and its devotion to abstract art over all else are exaggerated. In 1994, Michael Kimmelman, now the Times’ chief art critic, published a report on the history of the museum’s purchase and exhibition of Abstract Expressionist paintings, in “Studies in Modern Art,” a MOMA publication. His conclusion, recently confirmed by David Caute in his valuable history of Cold War cultural diplomacy, “The Dancer Defects” (Oxford; 2003), was that there was no unusual pattern of preference for Abstract Expressionism at the museum—some people at the time believed that Barr was rather late in recognizing its importance—and no record of international exhibitions specially emphasizing Abstract Expressionist works until the late nineteen-fifties, when a show called “The New American Painting” was sent abroad by MOMA in coördination with the International Arts Council, an organization affiliated with the museum and financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the U.S.I.A., which provided some publicity. In the catalogue for the exhibition, the show was referred to as “benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia.” By then, Pollock was dead, and Abstract Expressionism was no longer new.

Still, Barr was nothing if not a public-relations man. “Since 1929 he had worked to build an audience for modern art,” Perl writes. “Some might say that he had invented that audience.” He did, eventually, see the significance of Abstract Expressionism as an art form, and—always crucial for him—the importance of giving it popular appeal. If an association with Americanism and Cold War politics helped, then Barr was happy to propose one. In February, 1949, when Pollock had started on the short, great period in which he created the drip paintings, Time ran a mocking story referring to him as the “darling of the highbrow cult.” In March, Barr wrote a letter to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, to propose that his magazines consider changing their attitude toward modern art. He suggested that Abstract Expressionism might be regarded as “artistic free enterprise,” and he reminded Luce that attacking abstract art was something that totalitarian regimes did. In August, Life published a lavish piece on Pollock, with photographs of him at work by Arnold Newman. It made Pollock famous—the “action painter,” the very type of the modern American culture hero.

Cultural diplomacy is a tricky business in a democracy. It’s awkward to promote art officially by claiming that it is free from official constraints, and it is especially awkward if the art is, in fact, unpopular. Cold Warriors in the nineteen-fifties often found themselves in the position of propagandizing for American values by exhibiting art that was manifestly élite, and attacking the Soviet Union for mandating that art appeal to the common man. In 1952, Barr wrote a piece for the Times Magazine, “Is Modern Art Communistic?,” in which he tried to argue, in effect, that “democratic” is a totalitarian standard for judging art. He wasn’t wrong, but it meant that a lot of congressmen were behaving like totalitarians.

Then again, the American Artists Professional League wasn’t wrong when it complained, about the “Advancing American Art” exhibition, that modern art was “not indigenous to our soil.” The native style in the United States had been regionalist; mid-century modernism was internationalist, and the Abstract Expressionists, all of whom lived in New York, worked in an art scene dominated by European émigrés. Pollock’s first mentor, at the Art Students League of New York, was Thomas Hart Benton, the leader of what was known as “American Scene painting,” and a populist who hoped to make American painting as prestigious as Europe’s. Benton left New York in 1935 and returned to Missouri. He thought that the East Coast art establishment had been taken over by Communists. “Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States except New York,” he said. This was not the sort of artist the cultural Cold Warriors went out of their way to promote. His Americanism was much too pure. ♦

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